The Economics of Abundance

英語で読むITトレンド

クリス・アンダーソンが、「The Long Tail」に続く概念として提示しようとしているのが、この「The Economics of Abundance」。
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2006/10/the_economics_o.html
Powerpointプレゼンテーションもダウンロードできる。
解説はこちらにもある。
http://p6.hostingprod.com/@www.ventureblog.com/articles/indiv/2006/001260.html

The basic idea is that incredible advances in technology have driven the cost of things like transistors, storage, bandwidth, to zero. And when the elements that make up a business are sufficiently abundant as to approach free, companies appropriately should view their businesses differently than when resources were scarce (the Economy of Scarcity). They should use those resources with abandon, without concern for waste. That is the overriding attitude of the Economy of Abundance -- don't do one thing, do it all; don't sell one piece of content, sell it all; don't store one piece of data, store it all. The Economy of Abundance is about doing everything and throwing away the stuff that doesn't work. In the Economy of Abundance you can have it all.

Unlike the Economy of Abundance, scarcity requires that businesses make tough choices. The Economy of Scarcity is a zero sum game -- new offerings necessarily replace old.

The Economy of Abundance allows business owners to defer choices to the end users. What better way to find out what consumers want than to give them everything and see what they actually buy. That is the paradigm of abundance.

Much like the Long Tail, the idea of the Economy of Abundance is not prescriptive. It does not tell you how to run your business. But it points to another significant force at work in the new economy and suggests that entrepreneurs should think creatively about how their businesses might be transformed by utilizing abundant resources in a disruptive way.

http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/abundance_and_f.html

When I sat down in my first economics class at UCLA, the professor wrote on the blackboard all we would learn, in really big letters:

SCARCITY

I've been blogging for five years as of this month, and here's what I've learned:

ABUNDANCE

I have discovered I have a lot to give. And when I give, I notice others give more. Some of them I've formed relationships with, and trust opens giving, but I have also learned to trust strangers to share in abundance. Life is iterative, markets are not transactions and scarcity of attention is false. Our learnings compound abundance and there may be no limit to what we can produce.

http://www.core77.com/blog/events/poptech_06_day_3_4822.asp

Instead, Anderson talked about "The Economics of Abundance," repackaging a bit of the old deck into new constructs, sure, but impressing the audience with what is an undeniably powerful idea: What happens when we move from models of scarcity to abundance; when we "waste" transistors, waste storage, and waste bandwidth? Well, we get our two paradigms: Amazon instead of Walmart, iTunes instead of Tower Records, Netflix instead of Blockbuster, lonelygirl15 instead of Raymond. And, he had the quote of the day: "Google is the world's best tail-finder." The audience went crazy.

プレゼンテーションをダウンロードして、
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=1060
の解説を一緒に読むと何が話されたかよくわかる。
ところで、一年半前に本欄でロングテールの議論をしていたエントリーが「The Economics of Abundance」検索で引っかかってきた。
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/umedamochio/20050314/p1
なぜだろうと思ったら、クリス・アンダーソンがブログ読者に「The Long Tail」を本にするときのサブタイトルを募集していて、その結果を転記しておいた部分が引っかかったのだった。この「The Economics of Abundance」を「The Long Tail」本のサブタイトルにと提案していた読者がいたということである。